Thief of Time tds-26 Read online

  WITCHES ARE MATRILINEAL, said Death. THEY FIND IT MUCH EASIER TO CHANGE MEN THAN TO CHANGE NAMES.

  He went back to his desk and opened a drawer.

  There was a thick book there, bound in night. On the cover, where a book like this might otherwise say “Our Wedding” or “Acme Photo Album”, it said “MEMORIES”.

  Death turned the heavy pages carefully. Some of the memories escaped as he did so, forming brief pictures in the air before the page turned, and they went flying and fading into the distant, dark corners of the room. There were snatches of sound, too, of laughter, tears, screams and for some reason a brief burst of xylophone music, which caused him to pause for a moment.

  An immortal has a great deal to remember. Sometimes its better to put things where they will be safe.

  One ancient memory, brown and cracking round the edges, lingered in the air over the desk. It showed five figures, four on horseback, one in a chariot, all apparently riding out of a thunderstorm. The horses were at a flat gallop. There was a lot of smoke and flame and general excitement.

  AH, THE OLD DAYS, said Death. BEFORE THERE WAS THIS FASHION FOR HAVING A SOLO CAREER.

  SQUEAK? the Death of Rats enquired.

  OH, YES, said Death. ONCE THERE WERE FIVE OF US. FIVE HORSEMEN. BUT YOU KNOW HOW THINGS ARE. THERE'S ALWAYS A ROW. CREATIVE DISAGREEMENTS, ROOMS BEING TRASHED, THAT SORT OF THING. He sighed. AND THINGS SAID THAT PERHAPS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SAID.

  He turned a few more pages and sighed again. When you needed an ally, and you were Death, on whom could you absolutely rely?

  His thoughtful gaze fell on the teddy bear mug.

  Of course, there was always family. Yes. He'd promised not to do this again, but he'd never got the hang of promises.

  He got up and went back to the mirror. There was not a lot of time. Things in the mirror were closer than they appeared.

  There was a slithering noise, a breathless moment of silence, and a crash like a bag of skittles being dropped.

  The Death of Rats winced. The raven took off hurriedly.

  HELP ME UP, PLEASE, said a voice from the shadows. AND THEN PLEASE CLEAN UP THE DAMN BUTTER.

  Tick

  This desk was a field of galaxies.

  Things twinkled. There were complex wheels and spirals, brilliant against the blackness…

  Jeremy always liked the moment when he had a clock in pieces, with every wheel and spring carefully laid out on the black velvet cloth in front of him. It was like looking at Time, dismantled, controllable, every part of it understood…

  He wished his life was like that. It would be nice to reduce it to bits, spread them all out on the table, clean and oil them properly and put them together so that they coiled and spun as they ought to. But sometimes it seemed that the life of Jeremy had been assembled by a not very competent craftsman, who had allowed a number of small but important things to go ping into the corners of the room.

  He wished he liked people more, but somehow he could never get on with them. He never knew what to say. If life was a party, he wasn't even in the kitchen. He envied the people who made it as far as the kitchen. There would probably be the remains of the dip to eat, and a bottle or two of cheap wine that someone had brought along that'd probably be okay if you took out the drowned cigarette stubs. There might even be a girl in the kitchen, although Jeremy knew the limits of his imagination.

  But Jeremy never even got an invitation.

  Clocks, now… clocks were different. He knew what made clocks tick.

  His full name was Jeremy Clockson, and that was no accident. He'd been a member of the Guild of Clockmakers since he was a few days old, and everyone knew what that meant. It meant his life had begun in a basket, on a doorstep. Everyone knew how it worked. All the Guilds took in the foundlings that arrived with the morning milk. It was an ancient form of charity, and there were far worse fates. The orphans got a life, and an upbringing of a sort, and a trade, and a future, and a name. Many a fine lady or master craftsman or city dignitary had a telltale surname like Ludd or Doughy or Pune or Clockson. They'd been named after trade heroes or patron deities, and this turned them into a family, of a sort. The older ones remembered where they came from, and at Hogswatch they were free with donations of food and clothing to the various younger brothers and sisters of the basket. It wasn't perfect, but, then, what is?

  So Jeremy had grown up healthy, and rather strange, and with a gift for his adoptive craft that almost made up for every other personal endowment that he did not possess.

  The shop bell rang. He sighed and put down his eyeglass. He didn't rush, though. There was a lot to look at in the shop. Sometimes he even had to cough to attract the customer's attention. That being said, sometimes Jeremy had to cough to attract the attention of his reflection when he was shaving.

  Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available. He was puzzled that people seemed to think he was a boring conversationalist. Why, he could talk about all kinds of clock. Mechanical clocks, magical clocks, water clocks, fire clocks, floral clocks, candle clocks, sand clocks, cuckoo clocks, the rare Hershebian beetle clocks… But for some reason he always ran out of listeners before he ran out of clocks.

  He stepped out into his shop, and stopped.

  “Oh… I'm so sorry to have kept you,” he said. It was a woman. And two trolls had taken up positions just inside the door. Their dark glasses and huge ill-fitting black suits put them down as people who put people down. One of them cracked his knuckles when he saw Jeremy looking at him.

  The woman was wrapped in an enormous and expensive white fur coat, which might have explained the trolls. Long black hair cascaded over her shoulders, and her face was made up so pale that it was almost the shade of the coat. She was… quite attractive, thought Jeremy, who was admittedly no judge whatsoever, but it was a monochromatic beauty. He wondered if she was a zombie. There were quite a few in the city now, and the prudent ones had taken it with them when they died, and probably could afford a coat like that.

  “A beetle clock?” she said. She had turned away from the glass dome.

  “Oh, er, yes… The Hershebian lawyer beetle has a very consistent daily routine,” said Jeremy. “I, er, only keep it for, um, interest.”

  “How very… organic,” said the woman. She stared at him as if he was another kind of beetle. “We are Myria LeJean. Lady Myria LeJean.”

  Jeremy obediently held out a hand. Patient men at the Clockmakers' Guild had spent a long time teaching him how to Relate to People before giving it up in despair, but some things had stuck.

  Her ladyship looked at the waiting hand. Finally, one of the trolls lumbered over.

  “Der lady does not shake hands,” it said, in a reverberating whisper. “She are not a tactile kinda person.”

  “Oh?” said Jeremy.

  “But enough of this, perhaps,” said Lady LeJean, stepping back. “You make clocks, and we—”

  There was a jingling noise from Jeremy's shirt pocket. He pulled out a large watch.

  “If that was chiming the hour, you are fast,” said the woman.

  “Er… um… no… you might find it a good idea to, um, put your hands over your ears…”

  It was three o'clock. And every clock struck it at once. Cuckoos cuckooed, the hour pins fell out of the candle clock, the water clocks gurgled and seesawed as the buckets emptied, bells clanged, gongs banged, chimes tinkled and the Hershebian lawyer beetle turned a somersault.

  The trolls had clapped their huge hands over their ears, but Lady LeJean merely stood with her hands on her hips, head on one side, until the last echo died away.

  “All correct, we see,” she said.

  “What?” said Jeremy. He'd been thinking: perhaps a vampire, then?

  “You keep all your clocks at the right time,”
said Lady LeJean. “You're very particular about that, Mr Jeremy?”

  “A clock that doesn't tell the right time is… wrong,” said Jeremy. Now he was wishing she'd go away. Her eyes were worrying him. He'd heard about people having grey eyes, and her eyes were grey, like the eyes of a blind person, but she was clearly looking at him and through him.

  “Yes, there was a little bit of trouble over that, wasn't there?” said Lady LeJean.

  “I… I don't… I don't… don't know what you're—”

  “At the Clockmakers' Guild? Williamson, who kept his clock five minutes fast? And you—”

  “I am much better now,” said Jeremy stiffly. “I have medicine. The Guild was very kind. Now please go away.”

  “Mr Jeremy, we want you to build us a clock that is accurate.”

  “All my clocks are accurate,” said Jeremy, staring at his feet. He wasn't due to take his medicine for another five hours and seventeen minutes, but he was feeling the need for it now. “And now I must ask—”

  “How accurate are your clocks?”

  “Better than a second in eleven months,” said Jeremy promptly.

  “That is very good?”

  “Yes.” It had been very good. That was why the Guild had been so understanding. Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

  “We want much better accuracy than that.”

  “It can't be done.”

  “Oh? You mean that you can't do it?”

  “No, I can't. And if I can't, then neither can any other clockmaker in the city. I'd know about it if they could!”

  “So proud? Are you sure?”

  “I'd know.” And he would. He'd know for certain. The candle clocks and the water clocks… they were toys, which he kept out of a sort of respect for the early days of timekeeping, and even then he'd spent weeks experimenting with waxes and buckets and had turned out primitive clocks that you could, well, very nearly set your watch by. It was okay that they couldn't be that accurate. They were simple, organic things, parodies of time. They didn't grind across his nerves. But a real clock… well, that was a mechanism, a thing of numbers, and numbers had to be perfect.

  She put her head on one side again. “How do you test to that accuracy?” she said.

  They'd often asked him that in the Guild, once his talent had revealed itself. He hadn't been able to answer the question then, either, because it didn't make sense. You built a clock to be accurate. A portrait painter painted a picture. If it looked like the subject, then it was an accurate picture. If you built the clock right, it would be accurate. You didn't have to test it. You'd know.

  “I'd know,” he said.

  “We want you to build a clock that is very accurate.”

  “How accurate?”

  “Accurate.”

  “But I can only build to the limit of my materials,” said Jeremy. “I have… developed certain techniques, but there are things like… the vibration of the traffic in the street, little changes in temperature, that sort of thing.”

  Lady LeJean was now inspecting a range of fat imp-powered watches. She picked one up and opened the back. There was the tiny saddle, and the pedals, but they were forlorn and empty.

  “No imps?” she said.

  “I keep them for historical interest,” said Jeremy. “They were barely accurate to a few seconds a minute, and they'd stop completely overnight. They were only any good if your idea of accuracy was ‘around two-ish’.” He grimaced when he used the term. It felt like hearing fingernails on a blackboard.

  “How about invar?” said the lady, still apparently inspecting the museum of clocks.

  Jeremy looked shocked. “The alloy? I didn't think anyone outside the Guild knew about that. And it is very expensive. Worth a lot more than its weight in gold.”

  Lady LeJean straightened up. “Money is no object,” she said. “Would invar allow you to reach total accuracy?”

  “No. I already use it. It's true that it is not affected by temperature, but there are always… barriers. Smaller and smaller interferences become bigger and bigger problems. It's Xeno's Paradox.”

  “Ah, yes. He was the Ephebian philosopher who said you couldn't hit a running man with an arrow, wasn't he?” said the lady.

  “In theory, because—”

  “But Xeno came up with four paradoxes, I believe,” said Lady LeJean. “They involved the idea that there is such a thing as the smallest possible unit of time. And it must exist, mustn't it? Consider the present. It must have a length, because one end of it is connected to the past and the other is connected to the future, and if it didn't have a length then the present couldn't exist at all. There would be no time for it to be the present in.”

  Jeremy was suddenly in love. He hadn't felt like this since he'd taken the back off the nursery clock when he was fourteen months old.

  “Then you're talking about… the famous ‘tick of the universe’,” he said. “And no gear cutter could possibly make gears that small…”

  “It depends on what you would call a gear. Have you read this?”

  Lady LeJean waved a hand at one of the trolls, who lumbered over and dropped an oblong package on the counter.

  Jeremy undid it. It contained a small book. “Grim Fairy Tales?” he said.

  “Read the story about the glass clock of Bad Schuschein,” said Lady LeJean.

  “Children's stories?” said Jeremy. “What can they tell me?”

  “Who knows? We will call again tomorrow,” said Lady LeJean, “to hear about your plans. In the meantime, here is a little token of our good faith.”

  The troll laid a large leather bag on the counter. It clinked with the heavy, rich clink of gold. Jeremy didn't pay it a great deal of attention. He had quite a lot of gold. Even skilled clockmakers came to buy his clocks. Gold was useful because it gave him the time to work on more clocks. These earned him more gold. Gold was, more or less, something that occupied the space between clocks.

  “I can also obtain invar for you, in large quantities,” she said. “That will be part of your payment, although I agree that even invar will not serve your purpose. Mr Jeremy, both you and I know that your payment for making the first truly accurate clock will be the opportunity to make the first truly accurate clock, yes?”

  He smiled nervously. “It would be… wonderful, if it could be done,” he said. “Really, it would… be the end of clockmaking.”

  “Yes,” said Lady LeJean. “No one would ever have to make a clock again.”

  Tick

  This desk is neat.

  There is a pile of books on it, and a ruler.

  There is also, at the moment, a clock made out of cardboard. Miss picked it up.

  The other teachers in the school were known as Stephanie and Joan and so on, but to her class she was very strictly Miss Susan. “Strict”, in fact, was a word that seemed to cover everything about Miss Susan and, in the classroom, she insisted on the Miss in the same way that a king insists upon Your Majesty, and for pretty much the same reason.

  Miss Susan wore black, which the headmistress disapproved of but could do nothing about because black was, well, a respectable colour. She was young, but with an indefinable air of age about her. She wore her hair, which was blond-white with one black streak, in a tight bun. The headmistress disapproved of that, too—it suggested an Archaic Image of Teaching, she said, with the assurance of someone who could pronounce a capital letter. But she didn't ever dare disapprove of the way Miss Susan moved, because Miss Susan moved like a tiger.

  It was in fact always very hard to disapprove of Miss Susan in her presence, because if you did she gave you a Look. It was not in any way a threatening look. It was cool and calm. You just didn't want to see it again.

  The Look worked in the classroom, too. Take homework, another Archaic Practice the headmistress was ineffectually Against. No dog ever ate the homework of one of Miss Susan's students, because there was somethin
g about Miss Susan that went home with them; instead the dog brought them a pen and watched imploringly while they finished it. Miss Susan seemed to have an unerring instinct for spotting laziness and effort, too. Contrary to the headmistress's instructions, Miss Susan did not let the children do what they liked. She let them do what she liked. It had turned out to be a lot more interesting for everyone.

  Miss Susan held up the cardboard clock and said: “Who can tell me what this is?”

  A forest of hands shot up.

  “Yes, Miranda?”

  “It's a clock, miss.”

  Miss Susan smiled, carefully avoided the hand that was being waved by a boy called Vincent, who was also making frantically keen “ooo, ooo, ooo” noises, and chose the one behind him.

  “Nearly right,” she said. “Yes, Samuel?”

  “It's all cardboard made to look like a clock,” said the boy.

  “Correct. Always see what's really there. And I'm supposed to teach you to tell the time with this.” Miss Susan gave it a sneer and tossed it away.

  “Shall we try a different way?” she said, and snapped her fingers.

  “Yes!” the class chorused, and then it went “Aah!” as the walls, floor and ceiling dropped away and the desks hovered high over the city.

  A few feet away was the huge cracked face of the tower clock of Unseen University.

  The children nudged one another excitedly. The fact that their boots were over three hundred feet of fresh air didn't seem to bother them. Oddly, too, they did not seem surprised. This was just an interesting thing. They acted like connoisseurs who had seen other interesting things. You did, when you were in Miss Susan's class.

  “Now, Melanie,” said Miss Susan, as a pigeon landed on her desk. “The big hand is on the twelve and the enormous hand is nearly on the ten, so it's…”

  Vincent's hand shot up. “Ooo, miss, ooo, ooo…”

  “Nearly twelve o'clock,” Melanie managed.

  “Well done. But here…”

  The air blurred. Now the desks, still in perfect formation, were firmly on the cobbles of a plaza in a different city. So was most of the classroom. There were the cupboards, and the Nature Table, and the blackboard. But the walls still lagged behind.